On Tuesday, May 14, Rabbis Benjamin Ross, Josh Feigelson, Jenny Solomon, and Cantor Julia Cadrain, held a candid and timely conversation about the burnout crisis. Josh and Benjamin’s recent joint report, Holy Work, Human Limits, Communal Potential, captures the gravity of this issue, and together they shared the findings and open a dialogue about where we go from here.
Rabbi Nancy Flam: Let’s just rest in ourselves for a minute or two. Allow everything else to just be what it is. And just just I invite you to rest in yourself. Sitting for a minute or two. Why don’t—So, we’re in a progression in our meditation instructions and practice over this retreat preparing ourselves to experience what revelation might be. So in a way the instructions and the teaching is—will be pointing us to more and more subtle aspects of mind and being such that we might make ourselves transparent to revelation. That’s the preparation. So, I’d like to start this morning with with a teaching. Um, it’s actually written out on the sheets. I think they’re—um—below your seats. Thank you, Rachel and Maidelle and Shy for putting them out there. Um, and it’s about this word ani. Surprise, surprise.
Rabbi Nancy Flam: So, this—first I’ll read the text from Deuteronomy. This is right before Moses repeats the revelation, the content of the Ten Commandments. And Moses is saying to the people:
Face to face. Face to face. God spoke to you on the mountain out of the fire. I stood between you and God at that time to convey God’s words to you. For you were afraid of the fire and did not go up the mountain. saying, “I the eternal am your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage.”
And that last line of course starts Anokhi. So that’s what God first spoke. And um the people were afraid as we recall from the Zornberg—could be annihilating. What can we bear? We can’t bear it. The people said, “You do it for us. You stand between us and God. We won’t be able to bear it. We won’t be able to maintain our identity as the Zornberg taught.” Fair enough.
And now we have this teaching from the Mor of Ameshesh, another third generation teacher, Hasidic great on the parasha of Be’haalotcha. And he wrote:
I heard from the holy Rav, our teacher Yel Mikl, the preacher from the holy congregation of Zlatov, a drash on the verse, “I stand before you and God,” which is of course what Moses said. And he teaches that is in his name—the Mor of Hashemish is teaching—if a person makes themself out to be important or clever—a somebody—that only creates a separating partition that is the work of an “I.”
Meaning that if out of pride one says I’m a somebody with good qualities that will stand between you and God—that will stand between you and God. Through such doing, you erect a separating partition. You need to know that you are like nothing at all. Only what the Holy One of blessing gives to you by way of your life force to accomplish something great or small. For God makes everything be. Therefore, it is not fitting for any person to say I. Rather, it is only fitting for God to say I.
Try that on for size—right? It’s a profound teaching and for those of you who have been students of meditation for some time you know that the whole question of I, me, and mine—relating everything back to me—can be problematic, imprisoning, obscuring in terms of what’s really real. What’s really real?
Rabbi Nancy Flam: So, I’m going to read you a couple pieces from Danny Matt which I read at this very time last year and which we talked about afterwards on the Zoom call. Um, but you liked it so much I wanted to bring it back. So, these are the pieces, and not all of you were here last year, of course. Danny Matt writes in my all-time favorite essay, if you have not read it or not read it recently, as in the last month, go read it again. It’s called “Beyond the Personal God,” and it’s in the 1994 spring edition of the Reconstructionist Journal. You can find it online for free or email me, and I’ll send it to you.
In that essay, he talks about how the idea of a personal god and the idea of a separate personhood that we are sort of arise together are mutually reinforcing. But there’s another way to construct reality and divinity which is without separation. The aleph—ein od milvado—as John taught us—that’s it. It’s just all divinity, no separation. And that’s what can be an overwhelming experience. And the people said, “No, no, no, no, no. We’d like to—we’d like to—we don’t want to die and we don’t want to lose our separate existence.” Understandable. We might, no pun intended, identify with that perspective.
So what meditation practice can do is train us toward more and more transparency to the point that we can bear. It’s not an all or no proposition. It’s not like come up to the mountain and be there or don’t. Our meditation train helps us to efface that sense of I, the attachment, the identification—and where we experience more of the teeming vitality that is life of which we are a part. That is a central project of Hasidoot—bittul ha-yesh—effacement of self. Effacement. And what’s so cool is that our meditation practice in this way can be a training toward that for as much as we can bear. Each according to her strength. Okay. Danny Matt:
Over our lifetime in collaboration with our family and friends, we’ve woven a story about ourselves—a story that defines who we are. The ego cannot be understood or expressed except in relation to an audience. And this audience’s responses, real or imagined, continually shape the way in which we define ourselves, the story we tell. We do not consciously and deliberately figure out what narratives to tell and how to tell them. For the most part, we don’t spin our tales, they spin us. These streams of narrative issue forth as if—if from a single source—to those around us, it seems that a unified agent has authored the story—that there’s a center of narrative gravity. This apparent center, this apparent self is an enormously helpful simplification, but it’s an abstraction, not a thing in the brain. Though fictional, it is remarkably robust and almost tangible.
And later he writes—actually it’s earlier in the essay he writes:
“I’m looking out the window at a tree. My eye follows a branch and focuses on a leaf.” Leaf. The name is mentally satisfying. I found the appropriate label. I know what I’m seeing. But the appropriateness of the name lulls me into thinking that there’s really a separate object there called leaf. As if the leaf were not part of a continuum. Blade, veins, stem, stipule, twig, branch, limb, bough, trunk, root. So, the name leaf is misleading. Maybe I should just stick with tree. But is there really a separate self-contained thing I can call by that name? Down below, the roots absorb water and minerals from the soil. Up above, the chlorophyll in the leaves traps and stores the energy of sunlight. The leaf is not separate from the tree. The tree is not separate from the earth and the atmosphere. Nothing is entirely separate from anything else.
Nothing is entirely separate from anything else. We need names to navigate through life, but those very names obscure the flowing continuum. Behind each handy name is a teeming reality that resists our neat definitions. Don’t we want to get close to that? Don’t we want to know that—don’t we want to experience the living beings that we are like that. We do. We do. And our meditation practice is a training toward that loosening of this attachment, this identification with the fiction, the word I. Only God, the Mor of Hashemish says in the name of the Zlatover, only God should say I.
Rabbi Nancy Flam: So for our practice, yeah, I told you we’d be building on the mental noting. It’s good news or bad news. Um but it’s—it’s simple. Um so what I’m going to suggest today is for a mental noting if you so wish is that the way we label—note the experience—is “something’s arising.” It’s arising in the field of consciousness. So—”thought arising,” “sensation arising,” “emotion arising,” whatever we notice, we get even the word I out of the way like “I’m angry.” Oh no, it’s really actually very cool. It’s actually a hot experience, but “anger arising,” you know, rather than “I’m angry”—that kind of locks things in there. Have you noticed?
But if we can open our arms to be that field of consciousness co-terminus with all sensations. And we say “anger arising,” “constriction arising,” “thought arising,” like the whole crazy concatenation of what it is. Often when—say “anger arises,” but keep the “I” out of it because only God should say I. Let’s just experiment with what happens with that. Does it allow us to relax more? Does it allow us to just open the limbs of our being so that the energy can come through as this color or that flavor without making it mine, without identifying with it. I mean, it’s fairly ridiculous what goes through a human mind. It’s—it’s—have you noticed it’s ridiculous, right? It’s like—and we think everything’s so important. And it’s not that our lives, our discernments, our decisions are not important, but each moment if we can get a little bit of release, it’s—it’s experience arising, you know, it might bring a smile to your face. It’s like, yeah, it’s like they say, get over yourself, you know, it’s like—it’s so freeing.
Rabbi Nancy Flam: Anyway, that’s my testimony today. You got it. Um, so we’re going to practice that way. And, um, does anyone have a question about that? About the practice where we might name drop in? And you can keep it general or you can get more granular in the kind of particular flavor of the thought. You can say you know “remembering arising” or “judgment arising” but it’s just arising. Does anyone have a question about the practice I’m suggesting? Yes.
Participant: Do you place a higher value on saying emotion arising than naming the specific emotion?
Rabbi Nancy Flam: No, it doesn’t matter. No, in fact, you know, whatever is going to keep your mind relaxed, at ease, awake, just to notice something’s arising. If it helps you to be more precise because that makes you more awake to your experience, go for it. More general can sometimes just be more easeful. Experiment with it. Anything else?
Okay. So, we’re going to practice. But first, this is a bit belated. I’m going to remind you about posture. I know. Why didn’t I do this on the first day? Oh, you know, whatever. Okay. So, the main thing, the most important thing is that we want this balance of alert and relaxed, which is not what we usually practice—either we are alert and tight or we’re relaxed and somnolent. So actually we want to cultivate a sense of relaxation and alertness.
So you want to feel your sitsbones. It’s helpful to have your feet on the floor. It is helpful to have your hips higher than your knees. So if you need to sit up on a pillow for that—um—like—like Josh is, you can Carol Merrill over there. Yeah, Josh is modeling how you might sit so your hips are above your knees. That allows you to stay erect without using all your muscles to do so. You want to not lean back on the back of the chair. You actually—you can even—um—do an external rotation on your thighs so you can really feel your sitsbones really planted there. You’ve got a good tripod of a—of a base.
Hands can rest on your thighs. Up or down, it doesn’t matter. Shoulders down and back. You might roll them once or twice. Imagine the head resting on top of the spine like a balloon, like a helium balloon. Right in line. Chin—chin slightly tucked in toward the notch of the neck. Just very slightly. Jaw relaxed. And can open and close the jaw a couple times at the beginning of a sit. Eyes can be open or closed. And you might just do a little scan to invite relaxation where it’s possible. We’ll sit together. Rest with your anchor. From time to time, drop in a mental note. Sensation arising. A thought arising. And come back to your anchor. Notice when a sense of I comes in. Invite yourself to release that and go back to noticing something arising. The thing—if you’ve gotten lost, come back. Rest with your anchor.
[Period of silence]
Rabbi Nancy Flam: Wondering if a few people would like to share observations or questions about working with this practice. And would you—would you speak up, Louis?
Louis: I’ll speak up so I can hear myself. Um, what—what does it mean? I know—I know in the beginnings of my meditation I know what it meant when I would fall asleep or my mind would really wander off base. What does it mean when in this meditation I did not—not definitively interact with the presentation as part of my process. Instead, I was just very tranquil and transparent. I’m wondering if I can catch myself an enormous break and say, “Oh, then you were absorbing it subliminally” or if I can—or if I hold myself accountable and say, “Nice try, Louis.”
Rabbi Nancy Flam: Oh, Louis, you’re so good. Um, I mean that. I mean that. Um, I mean that. Um, it’s beautiful what you’re sharing, which is that you just experienced a sense of tranquility and transparency and you didn’t choose to—um—um—effort to do this practice. It sounded like—um—something of it came in and you meditated. So, bravo. That’s fantastic. And I wouldn’t—I wouldn’t go another layer out of like what does it mean? Or you know, are you able? You just don’t want to, you know. No, no, it’s not that. It’s not that. It’s—um—um—my—my gut sense is that—um—you engaged in meditation. So that’s beautiful. And not only that—there was a sense it sounds like of—of ease, of openness, of transparency, of alertness. Um so that’s great. Thank you. Thank you. That’s great. That’s great. Ken yirbu. So, may that increase. Yeah. Beautiful. Um, Marte?
Marte: So I have never cared for mental note.
Rabbi Nancy Flam: Okay.
Marte: And I’ve always felt like the words got in the way.
Rabbi Nancy Flam: Yeah.
Marte: Um, but for some reason today, the way you explained it, or maybe it’s because we did a second day, this really appealed to me as an experiment and I was able to engage and realize that particularly on retreat I get to a place of spaciousness, openness, comfort and peace and it kind of is a space. So then I’m thinking is this a sensation or is this an emotion or this is a thought and then I said no this is my anchor. This place is my anchor which brought me back to last night David’s point about God revelation that God and revelation is always there. The issue is when I am prepared and I can reach him. So I am like so jazzed.
Rabbi Nancy Flam: All right. All right. We—okay. We are accepting not so pleasant experiences as well to share. So just so you know—that is beautiful. I love it. I’m happy. Um thank you for sharing that. Yes.
Unnamed Participant: I’m going to accommodate less pleasant.
Rabbi Nancy Flam: Okay, less pleasant is coming.
Unnamed Participant: So, um I found it relatively easy to just say arising whatever was arising. That seemed to make me more relaxed, less of critical thing and then I got sleep.
Rabbi Nancy Flam: Okay.
Unnamed Participant: So now kind of lost my alertness in my—in this whole process and then I would struggle to be more alert, sit up, whatever. I’m not going to go back. But it was a kind of—
Rabbi Nancy Flam: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. Um yeah, I just had a couple thoughts. I want to see if I can catch them. Right. This practice—um—my experience is with this kind of mental noting that more relaxation comes to the body. It was beautiful noticing you notice that—and then as I said before, our default is relaxed somnolent.
Unnamed Participant: Right.
Rabbi Nancy Flam: Right. Alert, tight. And so what you noticed is that with relax came somnolent. That’s fine. And you could continue the practice. I mean, we’re just noticing how this whole system works so that we can operate it with more grace and wisdom. Um you can continue the practice which is—um—”sleepiness arising.” “Fuzziness arising.” If it’s unpleasant to you because you’re starting to struggle, “unpleasant arising,” you can just keep the practice with whatever is happening. You see what I’m saying?
Unnamed Participant: I do. I felt the urge to—um—”sleepiness arising.” I don’t want to be sleepy.
Rabbi Nancy Flam: Yeah.
Unnamed Participant: I need to sit up more alert. I need to—
Rabbi Nancy Flam: Yeah. Yeah. “I need to”—that came out. And that’s okay, too. We always have choice with sleepiness or any hindrance. So sleepiness is one of the five hindrances. We always have a choice which is to—uh—be mindful of the hindrance that’s arising or apply some kind of antidote. And so with sleepy one of the antidotes is open the eyes or stand up. Is it harder to fall asleep when we’re standing up? Um hopefully. So we can do one of two things when we notice what we might label a hindrance to our balanced alert and relaxation. We can either mindfully notice and be with kindness and clarity or we can apply one or another antidote. So, it’s—it’s just interesting to know it’s an art. Meditation is truly an art. There’s science to it, but there’s also art to it. And we become better artists as we—as we practice. Yeah. I can’t even see because of the sun who’s in the back? It’s Keith…
Peter: Peter.
Rabbi Nancy Flam: Peter.
Peter: Um I—uh—I noticed things arising. I forgot—this is very helpful just now. I forgot to—to say it was arising. So I was like, “Oh, I do a lot of planning. I do a lot of like—I’m sort of noticing where my head is going.” Uh and at the—at the very end my legs started to hurt and I’m kind of looking at the clock and then I said, “Okay, I’m gonna stretch” and then like a minute later you ring the bell. I’m like, “f***, I could really bing [sic] up.” Um, so—so—um—
Rabbi Nancy Flam: Good noticing.
Peter: Um, but what I’m curious about is like I’ve always had this sense of like you just, you know, in meditation you are with what is, right? Like you—you—you—know just be with what is—like that hurts then it hurts whatever—you’re not—you’re not changing anything—but I’m curious about what you just said around the distinction between that and hindrances and doing something to change the—I lost a little bit in that.
Rabbi Nancy Flam: Sure sure question—yeah—so as I said—um—noticing something that feels like a hindrance to—to our mindfulness to our balanced mindfulness—balanced mind—we can be with that so—or we can apply an antidote. So with pain this is where sort of art and discernment comes you know—um—pain if it’s not too extreme and doesn’t overwhelm our mindfulness can be very interesting support for mindfulness for meditation right we go—um—you know “tightness arising,” “constriction arising,” “heat arising,” “aversion arising.” So that’s another thing we can notice—desire, aversion or spacing out. It’s technically called delusion arising. So we can notice the aversion which is kind of a second level—um—noticing.
Um and then if it’s becoming like we’re agitated, we are becoming unbalanced, we don’t have enough mindfulness to meet the moment which is always a discernment. Do I have enough mindfulness to meet the moment or not? Because sometimes we do and sometimes we don’t. So then wisdom can say I’m going to stand up. No need for—like—it wasn’t a failure. It wasn’t a failure. That could have been wisdom saying you know though it was subconscious there’s not enough mindfulness here for me to meet the moment—moment as it’s presenting itself. I have another choice. I’m going to mindfully stand up, stretch, feel the release. Oh, pleasant. Oh, you know, deep breath and sit down again. So, it—it in my—um—in my way of practicing and how I’ve been taught, it’s not one right answer. It’s not like just sit there till your mind becomes so tight like a corkscrew that like—what’s the point of that you know that doesn’t increase mindfulness. We’re trying to increase mindfulness. Does that help?
Peter: Yeah. Yeah, it does. I where I get caught up a little bit is—is—if fix my logic here. If the—if the—if the goal ultimately is to be able to sit with what is—I can’t—stand getting in the way of my mindfulness. So, I’m going to stand up. Now, I’m revealing my psychology. How is that not failure?
Rabbi Nancy Flam: Oh, because—um—because you do it mindfully. You are make wisdom. So wisdom has to come in. Wisdom has to come in. Wisdom has to come in to say what’s the wise choice here—to continue to breathe. Make space for the pain. Investigate it. Allow it. You know, usually it will subside at some point. Um—um—but if there’s not enough mindfulness to meet the moment, there’s not enough mindfulness on board. We haven’t sat for two weeks straight. Maybe after two weeks there’d be enough, you know, it’s all conditions. So conditions are—wisdom says, you know, evaluating the conditions that are actually on board, right? And making a wise decision. So, um, yeah, thank you for that. I think, you know what I think we’ll do? I’m seeing so many—so many—No, no, we’re going to go to Rex. And then I’m thinking about tomorrow afternoon. I think we’re going to do more question and answer because I think that will be more valuable than anything—um—I might have prepared next year. Okay, Rex.
Rex: Um so building on David’s experience, um Wednesday night I did not sleep well and yesterday morning I think I fell asleep at least eight times the sit. Um, and today there was none of that. Not a good night sleep. Um, and I noticed—um—after a little bit of time—uh—that imagining—there was a lot of imagining happening and I noticed “imagining arising”—coming back—um—and then a—an itching sensation arose near my eye and—um—thought arose. Thought was, “Oh, itching is—half itching is rising—and sun is shining on that plate of grass over there and it’s all the same”—and then there was delight—and then I—and so the light—but the light and back to breath—so—and there was a moment I—I—there was a moment ego actually stepping like, “Oh, triumph! I became one with everything.”
Rabbi Nancy Flam: Yeah—yeah—with everything. All right. So, we have self-condemnation. We have self-congratulation.
Rex: Okay. Yeah. So, just—just sharing that I’m finding the name helpful because it does—it actually—even the emotion. Yeah. It’s really gentle and loving and okay, come back to the breath.
Rabbi Nancy Flam: Fantastic. That’s beautiful. Um yeah, I mean it connects back to in what I said at the top which is like you know the mind is fairly ridiculous when you watch it and—um—I mean we can say that with love but it’s a wild place the mind right it’s pretty wild it’s like—itch—don’t like it—sun—delight—planning—like holy Toledo you know it’s not easy to navigate. And hopefully our practice helps us navigate the mind, the heart, the body and ultimately in this Jewish context brings us as well to a sense of the ani, the ein od milvado, the fiction of the eye. Because that ultimately leads to greater availability for others and greater delight in being part of the mystery which Jonathan spoke of in Heschel’s words this morning.
Rabbi Nancy Flam: I’d like to close with—um—two pieces—um—to bring us back to the theme of the teaching today that there may be moments of revelation where we have become more transparent, less filled with the I-identification and therefore more clear as a conduit for divinity. So here’s a piece—um—that I also read last year, but everyone liked it, so I’m going to read it again. Well, it might or might not be here. Yep. Yeah. This piece by Thich Nhat Hanh. So, here’s a poem. He’s a poet.
Looking into a flower, you can see that the flower is made of many elements that we can call non-flower elements. When you touch the flower, you touch the cloud. You cannot remove the cloud from the flower because if you could remove the cloud from the flower, the flower would collapse right away. You don’t have to be a poet in order to see a cloud floating in the flower. But you know very well that without the clouds, there would be no rain and no water for the flower to grow. So cloud is part of flower. And if you send the element cloud back to the sky there will be no flower. Cloud is a non-flower element and the sunshine—you can touch the sunshine here. If you send back the element sunshine the flower will vanish and sunshine is another non-flower element. And earth and gardener—if you continue you will see a multitude of non-flower elements in the flower. In fact a flower is made only with non-flower elements. It does not have a separate self. A flower cannot be by herself alone. A flower has to interbe with everything else that is called non-flower. That’s what we call interbeing. You cannot be. You can only interbe. The word interbe can reveal more of the reality that the word—than the word to be. You cannot be by yourself alone. You have to interbe with everything else. So the true nature of the flower is the nature of interbeing. The nature of no self. The flower is there. Beautiful, fragrant. Yes. But the flower is empty of a separate self. To be empty is not a negative note. Because of emptiness, everything becomes possible. So a flower is described as empty. But I like to say it different. A flower is empty only of a separate self. But a flower is full of everything else. The whole cosmos can be seen, can be identified and touched in one flower. So to say that the flower is empty of a separate self also means that the flower is full of the cosmos. It’s the same thing. You are of the same nature as a flower. You are empty of a separate self, but you are full of the cosmos. You are as wonderful as the cosmos. You are a manifestation of the cosmos.
And then—um—I chose this one for—for Nancy Krakar, but I don’t know if she’s here because I don’t see her. Nancy, are you here? Okay, you probably know what—Nancy, for those of you who don’t know, is—is—an Emily Dickinson scholar and fanatic. I say that with love. Um and I have no—another poem. I’m sorry. Sorry, I’m going to make you wait because it’s so good and it looks like it might be in my folder. Today’s Friday morning. This is Friday morning folder. Okay. Oh, here it is.
I’m nobody. Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there’s a pair of us. Don’t tell! They’d advertise—you know!
How dreary—to be—somebody! How public—like a frog— To tell your name—the livelong June— To an admiring bog!
Rabbi Nancy Flam: I’m nobody. Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there’s a pair of us. Don’t tell. They’d advertise. You know how dreary to be somebody. How public like a frog to tell your name the livelong June to an admiring bog.
In this video teaching, we begin by contrasting the earth-shaking revelation at Sinai in Exodus 19 and 20 with the subtle, silent murmur of I Kings 19. This distinction serves as a map for our meditation, guiding us past the noise of the ego toward a sanctuary of inner quietude. Here, we connect with the source of divine wisdom to receive a fresh transmission of inner Torah—revealing that the voice of the Divine is still speaking to us, here and now.
This video originally appeared as part of a week-long IJS Daily Sit series in 2021, titled: Standing (or Sitting!) at Sinai, Here and Now: A Week-Long Jewish Mindfulness Meditation Intensive. Click here to access the entire series.
A Note on Language and Inclusion
I created the content before I began my personal journey of growing in awareness about my own disability and my unconscious use of ableist language. I apologize for using metaphors that assume specific physical or sensory abilities. As you engage with this teaching and practice, I invite you to adapt my language to your own experience—perhaps replacing words like “see” or “hear” with “notice,” “observe,” “perceive,” or “tune in.”
May this teaching support all of us to tune into the Torah we need right now – for our own benefit and the benefit of all beings,
Sam.
We are heading into the seventh and final week of the Omer period, associated with the sephirah (Divine emanation) of Malkut (Sovereignty), which in Jewish mystical tradition is connected with holy speech. The focus of our practice this week is sh’mirat hadibbur, mindful speech. How might we channel all the middot, the sacred traits we have cultivated over the Omer period, so they inform how we interface with the world through speech and action? How can we transform our communications into divrei kodesh, holy words?
As an example of how we might use Jewish mindfulness tools to nurture our innate capacity to communicate wisely and from the sacred traits within us, consider the following situation with which many of us are familiar: speaking up to an authority figure on behalf of others who may not be in a position to do so for themselves. (This example is drawn from the module about Shmirat haDibbur, mindful speech, in the IJS Awareness in Action program.)
Imagine you need to speak to a doctor on behalf of a loved one. You’re feeling concerned about their condition and their care, and have questions about their treatment. The doctor is busy and has been hard to reach. You’ve left a number of messages and the office keeps insisting you’ll hear back soon. Finally, your phone rings: the doctor is calling you back.
You only have a few precious minutes. A lot is riding on how it goes. Your intention is to express all your concerns and raise all your questions. You want to communicate with respect, but also be treated with respect. You want to honor the doctor’s expertise, but not be intimidated by the doctor’s authority. You want to communicate warmly, but not be submissive.
Step one is to cultivate hitlamdut, kind, nonjudgmental attention to what is happening in this moment. Notice what’s happening within you and, as judgments arise, let those pass. Scan your body, and just observe: maybe your chest is constricted, your breath shallow, your heart speeding. Your mind may be racing with fear-based thoughts.
Maybe worry or sadness and pain is feeding critical thoughts about the healthcare system, medical professionals in general, or this doctor in particular. You may have anxiety about your loved one’s condition. Speaking with an authority figure may be deeply uncomfortable. You may notice frustration at not hearing back more quickly from the doctor, annoyance about the doctor calling you back at an inconvenient time.
You might be nervous whether the doctor will be receptive to your concerns, or will be defensive. Recognize your anxiety as it manifests in your body, your breathing, your emotions, and your mind. Accept these anxiety-based thoughts and emotions as they are, without wishing or pushing them away.
Now move to the next step, the bechirah point – the moment in which you grow more aware of your options.
Begin by investigating your habitual reaction in this situation. Maybe your anxiety feeds an instinct to become passive, deferential, or avoid. Maybe it inclines you to get off the phone before fully exploring the issues. This approach would ill-serve your loved one and leave you feeling guilty and more frustrated. Maybe your worry leads you to be overly confrontational. Maybe when you are nervous, you tend to express anger or hostility. That might feel good at the moment, but surely it would be unhelpful and unwise.
Investigate your underlying anxiety, the obstacle drawing you away from your original intention, which risks leading you to express yourself in an unwise and unproductive way. Then practice non-identification by remembering that anxiety is the normal human reaction in this situation, and it is not you. You might silently whisper, “This is anxiety, and it, too, will pass.”
Now, apply the middah of sh’mirat hadibbur, the capacity to use speech for holy purpose. Return to your original intention. What kind of world do you want to create with your speech?
Now you have practiced sh’mirat hadibbur, not allowing your anxiety, anger, or fear to distort your words or to thwart your intention. You’ve spoken clearly, strongly, respectfully, and effectively. You’ve been an effective advocate for your loved one. Your words have emerged from the middot representing your best self.
This is just one scenario we may find ourselves in during everyday life in which sh’mirat hadibbur, choosing wisely when and how to speak, can help us use the gift of speech. Through this middah, we can learn to raise our voice on behalf of ourselves and others who are vulnerable, in a way that emerges from our best selves and our most noble intentions.
If you’d like to go deeper into this practice, I invite you to join IJS Core Faculty Kohenet Keshira heLev Fife and Rebecca Schisler for their upcoming course Mindful Speech as a Spiritual Practice, which starts June 9th. Click here for more information.
Happy birthday to me! I’m in the midst of turning 50. My birthday on the Jewish calendar was last week, my birthday on the Gregorian calendar is next week. As my teacher Rabbi Dov Linzer remarked when I saw him the other day, “Some people refer to that as chol hamoed,” the intermediate days of the festival. Thank you in advance for all your good wishes.
Having a birthday in mid-May has long meant that I grow a year older in the midst of an emotionally rich time. Spring is in full bloom. Walking to elementary school in my neighborhood growing up, I would pass the flowering crabapple trees that always blossomed this week, loudly displaying their pink petals and spraying their sweet fragrance into the air.
When I arrived at school, there was a sense of wistfulness as the academic year was about to end and no one, not even the teachers, really wanted to be inside. The environment was one of end-of-year ceremonies, concerts, proms and their attendant angst about romantic relationships, graduations, and the mad dash to summer and its seeming liberation—along with, in high school, the anxiety of final exams.
All of that is part of my personal coding around my birthday.
So, it’s probably not surprising that I’ve found myself daydreaming about my childhood home more frequently in recent weeks. Images of those crabapple trees and their scent have been wafting through my mind. In meditation I’ve found my memory calling up unbidden the aroma of our family’s house, the smell of my dad’s pipe, the feel of our living room’s pea soup green shag carpet on my bare feet.
That has led me to wonder, what’s going on here? Is this nostalgia operating? I remembered a quotation from the scholar Svetlana Boym in her book, The Future of Nostalgia (2001): “At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time—the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams.” But don’t get too comfortable, because Boym critiques that: “In a broader sense, nostalgia is rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.”
Maybe. But I don’t think this is me mounting resistance, at least not actively. It’s something else, perhaps closer to Maya Angelou in A Letter to My Daughter: “Thomas Wolfe warned in the title of America’s great novel that ‘you can’t go home again.’ I enjoyed the book, but I never agreed with the title. I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and dragons of home under one’s skin, at the extreme corners of one’s eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.”
As I ride the carousel for my fiftieth turn about the sun, I find Angelou’s words more resonant. These sensory images of home—not only or even primarily visual, but aural, tactile, and especially olfactory—are finding their way to the surface, seemingly beckoning me to revisit them. Or, perhaps, more emphatically reminding me of the incessant demand to reckon with home and my experience of being at-home.
“You shall count off seven weeks of years—seven times seven years—so that the period of seven weeks of years gives you a total of forty-nine years,” the Torah commands. “Then you shall sound the shofar; in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month—the Day of Atonement—you shall have the shofar sounded throughout your land and you shall hallow the fiftieth year. You shall proclaim release throughout the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: each of you shall return to your holding and each of you shall return to your family. (Leviticus 25:8-10)
I wrote about this passage last fall as I prepared to encounter my fiftieth High Holidays. I quoted then Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague (d. 1609), who explains why the shofar for the Jubilee year is sounded on Yom Kippur rather than Rosh Hashanah, as we might have expected: “The Jubilee and Yom Kippur—the two are really one. For the Jubilee is the return of each individual to their original place of security, to be as it was in the beginning. And so too with Yom Kippur: everyone returns to their original place of security as the Holy Blessed One atones for them.” (Gur Aryeh Behar, s.v. “Mimashma”)
“Everyone returns to their original place of security.” Or, as Angelou might have put it, home: “The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” While the Jubilee envisions this, perhaps in the Torah’s own daydream, as a physical return home, the Yom Kippur dimension makes clear that, as in my own experience, home is not only or perhaps even primarily a place, but a state of being. Again, Angelou articulates it best: “I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do.”
“The land must not be sold in perpetuity,” cautions the Holy One, “for the land is Mine, and you are strangers and sojourners with Me” (Leviticus 25:23). I hear in Angelou an evocation of the Sefat Emet, who interprets this passage to mean that “in this world, we must be like strangers—we must know that our essence is from something beyond only the physicality of this world… ‘The land must not be sold in perpetuity’ suggests that we must not become fully estranged and removed from our supernatural roots.”
There is much more to say, of course, which is why I’m turning to this theme repeatedly in these writings. But it’s time to sum up this piece, and I cannot do so without expressing my profound gratitude to the many people who have aided and supported me for this first half-century, and the Source of Life. I have been blessed in far too many ways to count. I pray that the coming years will enable me to repay the many extraordinary gifts I have received—and to help us all to be and feel more truly, deeply at home.
For Reflection & Conversation
When you think of positive sensory images from home, what comes to mind? What do you notice about how you feel?
How does the idea of returning to home, physically or spiritually, feel in your body and mind?
One of the challenges of writing a weekly essay on the Torah portion along with a weekly podcast script while also serving as the CEO of a growing organization is that there’s not much time for other writing. My first—and to date, only—book came about entirely because I wrote each chapter for IJS’s annual Text Study program in 2020-21 (and I wasn’t yet writing these weekly reflections).
In recent months I’ve gotten some new inspiration for a larger project, which I’m hoping can become a book and which would focus on the idea of home and, even more, on the experience of at-homeness.
Regular readers will recognize that this is a theme I come back to regularly, and it feels to me like there’s something deeper going on here. Yes, clearly there’s something in the topic that animates me personally. But I also sense that questions of at-homeness underlie many of our collective questions and challenges, from borders and migration to Israel and the Jewish Diaspora, to AI and climate change. At the heart of many of these profoundly challenging issues is a deeply personal yet profoundly collective question: How do we feel at home?
I have explored these themes in many of these reflections already (you can look as recently as last week), but I share this preamble to tell you that, in service of this larger writing project, I’d like to use this frame for these reflections for the next little while. And: I hope you’ll write back with your own thoughts and experiences about not only what I have to say, but also where you might suggest we explore in this journey together.
The opening words of Parashat Emor are directed at the main characters of the book of Leviticus, the kohanim (priests): “And YHVH said to Moses, ‘Speak to the priests, the sons of Aaron, and say to them, ‘Let none [of you] defile himself for a dead person among his people’’” (Lev. 21:1). The Midrashic and Talmudic tradition reads this and the verses that follow as the basis for Jewish mourning customs, particularly in defining for whom one is required to mourn. That, in itself, teaches us something about our concept of home: Home is closely associated with the familiar and familial. Thus, who we define as a relative can inform our experience of being at home—particularly with whom we experience being at home.
Yet the verse itself uses neither the words home nor family. The key word for many commentators is the word am, “people.” Rashi, following the Midrash, comments that amav, “his people,” comes to teach that as long as someone from the Israelite people—i.e. the deceased’s extended family—is available to tend to the burial, then the priest should maintain his ritual purity and not become involved in tending to the dead. But, in the case of a met mitzvah, in which there’s no one else to do it, then the priest must become involved.
Rashi invites us to anchor the question of at-homeness in the relationship and status of the priest, who is both of the larger people but also apart from it—itself a key tension underlying the experience of being at home. What does it feel like, and what does it mean, to be at home with one’s immediate relatives? And how does that compare and contrast with being at home within a people, language, culture, civilization?
A Hasidic commentary can help us explore these questions further by interpreting the verse not merely as a commentary on the obligation of burial, but on the ethics of civic life. It comes from Rabbi Dov Ber, the Maggid of Mezritch (d. 1772): “‘Speak to the priests, the sons of Aaron…’ Those who rebuke the people and strive to return them to the good are in the category of ‘Priests, the sons of Aaron.’ And behold, the Torah says to each one of them: ‘Let none defile himself for a dead person among his people.’ At the time when one stands and rebukes the people, one must be careful and cautious not to defile or ruin their own soul through arrogance or ulterior motives.”
The Maggid, following his teacher the Ba’al Shem Tov, interprets the verse as a warning about the dangers inherent in the practice of tochacha, offering rebuke (or, perhaps, negative feedback), particularly by leaders of the people. This is not to say that leaders should avoid tochacha—the Torah just told us it’s a mitzvah in last week’s Torah portion! But, suggests the Maggid, leaders have to do real spiritual discernment to know where our tochacha is coming from: Is it pure? Or are there impure motivations? Is the leader uttering their words of rebuke from a place of genuine love and care for their fellows, or, perhaps, are their words more an expression of their own personal resentment, frustration, and even subtle (or not so subtle) desire for power and position?
While the Maggid seemingly confines his question to religious leaders in positions of authority, I think the rest of us can read ourselves into these questions too. Anyone who has ever lived in relationship with another—in a friendship, a marriage, as a parent or a child—can probably feel some resonance with this teaching. When do we speak up, and how? How do we discern our own motivations? These are intimate questions at the heart of familial relationships (and, perhaps, not a small number of hours in therapist’s office).
Read in the context of the question of at-homeness, I might therefore suggest the Maggid is extending the notion of shalom bayit, peace in the home, well beyond the confines of one’s immediate family—and thus inviting us to play with extending our notion of home as well. Indeed, he’s picking up that idea from the Torah itself. If one way of experiencing at-homeness is through a feeling of kinship and mutual responsibility, then the Maggid and the Torah are inviting us to reflect on whether we feel at home with a larger community—the Jewish people, other collectivities—and, if we do, what responsibilities and ethics might emerge as a result.
For Reflection & Conversation